By Matthew Clark Davison and Alice LaPlante

 

　　【1】True beauty in literature isn’t ornamental. It isn’t a lyrical flourish on the surface of pain, or a reward for rendering trauma with the right degree of humility. It’s what Sarah Lewis, in The Rise, calls “aesthetic force”—a quality that stuns, alters, destabilizes, and lodges itself in our memory not because it comforts us, but because it insists that we see something differently than before. In writing, as in life, the beautiful often travels with its opposite.

 

　　【2】In our classes and in our forthcoming book from W. W. Norton, The Lab: Experiments in Writing Across Genre, we’ve noticed students eager to portray darkness—pain, trauma, disillusionment—thinking that to be serious is to be bleak. That’s believing that a dark piece has to be dismal in both what happens (catastrophes!) and language. But what’s more difficult, and often more powerful, is finding beauty in that darkness. We’re not talking about tidy catharsis or moral uplift. We’re talking about work that engages readers in contradiction and shows them something previously invisible, even if they don’t want to see it.

 

　　【3】Lisa Bellamy’s poem “Thank You for the Tulips,” highlighted as an example in The Lab, does just that. The poem’s speaker, a mother, receives flowers from her adult daughter. The occasion is seemingly benign. But Bellamy uses this gentle gesture to open a torrent of confession: “I am sorry I was a drunk when you were a kid… I am sorry you fell out of your stroller when you were a toddler because I was hungover and forgot to buckle you in.” The tulips—a conventionally beautiful image—anchor the poem. But the force comes from the interplay of image and admission. The speaker’s regret is so palpable that the reader, rather than recoiling, leans in.

 

　　【4】Beauty here isn’t a mask. It’s a lens. The images the poet uses: iridescent tulips, the daughter’s flecked eyes, the hipster vegan donuts—all emerge in relief against failures of care and memory. By the time the poem ends, “You were a delicious baby,” readers feel something like grace—not because the speaker is redeemed, but because we’ve been invited into the complexity of her love and guilt without being told what to think.

 

　　【5】This is an example of how we might think of aesthetic force as a generative tool in our creative writing. It’s not about what the piece claims, but what it does. And it’s something that often occurs—not in moments of resolution—but in the tension between what’s shown and what’s withheld.

 

　　【6】In a conversation at the New York Public Library with Anna Deavere Smith, Sarah Lewis described aesthetic force as something that slips past the gates of logic and hits us emotionally before we can explain why. That’s what happened when an Apollo 8 astronaut turned his camera back toward Earth and captured Earthrise. It wasn’t just a technical marvel. The photo of the blue sphere awed those who saw it, moved them beyond the thinking mind, and stunned them with its floating blue display of our planet’s glory and fragility. Historians say the image helped launch the first Earth Day.

 

　　【7】In literature, that same force can arrive through a perfectly placed image or an unexpectedly intimate moment. In Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion, the narrator speaks of gambling in a way that reads almost like theology: “We gamble with the hope of winning. But it’s the thought of what we might lose that excites us.” The voice doesn’t explain. It seduces.

 

　　【8】We often ask our students to go small—focus on an image, a gesture, a line of dialogue—and to let it bloom in meaning rather than pin it down. In one anonymous student piece, an arm severed in a school shooting is described as “the pink of a cherry blossom… a flower just starting to unfurl.” The horror is obvious. The beauty is unsettling. And that’s the point.

 

　　【9】When talking about the visual arts, Lewis says aesthetic force can make us gasp. In writing, aesthetic force can cause us to stop reading, close our eyes, hug the book to our chests and breathe. It sharpens our attention. And it reminds us, again and again, that a beautiful sentence doesn’t have to describe a beautiful thing. It just has to reconfigure the way we see.

 

　　【10】Our advice to writers? Find what dazzles you and describe it, even if (especially if?) it also frightens or disgusts you. Make the image clear. Resist easy resolution. And don’t underestimate the power of beauty—not as decoration, but as revelation.

 

 

 

  汉译英原文 

 

徽州心灵

文/赵焰

 

　　【1】对一个地方真正的了解，莫过于对“地方心灵”的研究了。研究“地方心灵”，最好的方法不是去图书馆，也不是去博物馆，而是应该真真实实地在当地生活，去认识那地方的人。探究那种沉积在当地人心理结构中的文化传统，探究传统与形成、塑造、影响心理结构和思维模式的关系，包括道德自律、人生态度、直观才能等；或者去关注当地人在文学、艺术、习俗等文化现象中的表现，它包括整体的心理结构和精神力量，也包括地方伦理学和地方美学。这些才是“地方心灵”真正的东西。只有对一个地方的“地方心灵”真正明白了，才可以说是真正懂得了这个地方。这样的方法，是深入一个地方的唯一途径。

 

　　【2】一直以为徽州文化从根本上来说，是儒的。那是一种积极入世的精神，执着而实在，低调而倔犟。那种对仕途的追求、对成功的追求，以及为人处世的道德感和人情世故的平衡感，都可以说是这种文化的体现。再加上商业文化对徽州人的影响也比较大，使得徽州人更理性务实，为人精明，工于算计，人生的负重较多。但所有的东西都不是单一的，徽州人在表面精进的同时，深埋在进取心之下的，应该还有另外一层思想，那就是山水共融的愿望。

 

　　【3】一直在想，对于积极进取的儒学以及追求隐匿避世的道学来说，究竟哪一种更符合人类的本质呢？似乎两者都是，两者又是密不可分的。人类来自自然，又进化为社会。社会意味着竞争，而自然则是回归。在骨子里，每个人都带有亲近自然的回归愿望，这愿望是带有母性意味的。而同时，人在社会进程中又带有某种控制欲，带有明显的权力和控制意识，要求秩序，这样的意识也促进了“儒”的产生。这两种东西一直是相伴而生的。其实对于徽州人来说，“儒”的进取，是理性的，是社会的，是宗族的；而“道”则是个人的，是直觉的，是天然的，是油然于心的。儒和道，看似不相融，其实却是可以相融的。因为儒也好，道也好，它们都是人类情感和欲望的延伸，它们的源头都是人类最初的欲望和想法。儒与道更像是一艘船上的两把桨，儒是前行的保障，道则是平衡的杠杆。只不过这两者方式不一，到了一定的关口，分叉了，形成了两条河，各自有着自己的流向。而在本质上，它们却一直相缠相生着，它们是同一个事物的两个方面，是镜子的正面和反面。

 

（选自《思想徽州》，赵焰著，东方出版社，2006。标题为编者所加）

 

 

 

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